Posts tagged Flipped Classroom Teaching

Pharmaceutical and organic chemistry, School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry, UCC

For what purpose did you incorporate TEL into your teaching?

I hoped to use TEL as a means of facilitating a flipped classroom approach to spectroscopic analysis. The two main goals were to make the pre-classroom videos more interactive and to incorporate analytics to track student engagement.

How did you do this?

Following discussions with the Instructional Design Team in UCC, we decided that Articulate Storyline was the software package best suited to this project. After initial training sessions, I set about embedding Panopto videos into Storyline and then splitting the videos into short 3/4 minute segments. I next interspersed these segments with short quizzes. The quiz questions related directly to the preceding video segment. The package was designed in such a way that only on correctly answering each question was the student able to progress to the next section.

What were the benefits of this TEL tool?

Storyline is a very flexible tool for creating interactive video packages and it doesn’t require any programming skills. The layout is broadly similar to PowerPoint which makes it relatively easy to find your way around the menus. There are several question styles available in Storyline which allows you to bring incorporate a variety of questions. Lastly, Storyline can export content in SCORM format, which is compatible with the major VLEs (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle). This SCORM package links directly with the VLE grade centre, making it very easy to track student engagement and determine exactly how many students have completed their pre-classroom work.

What were the drawbacks?

Building up interactivity in Storyline requires the use of layers, triggers, variables etc. which are not especially intuitive at first. It does require some practice and trial-and-error in order to make full use of it.

What advice would you have for someone else wishing to use this tool?

The training provided by the Instruction Design Team was hugely beneficial. There is also an active online community using Storyline, many of whom are willing to share their Storyline creations. It is well worth checking these out as basic blueprints for your project – no point reinventing the wheel!

In this project, I am investigating how technology can be used to assist ‘flipped’ classroom teaching, specifically in the area of spectroscopic analysis of organic molecules. A flipped classroom is one where the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Lectures notes or videos are viewed by students beforehand, while class time is devoted to exercises and problem solving. One of the potential pitfalls with the flipped classroom is where some students may not have engaged with the video material beforehand and are, therefore, unable to properly participate in the problem-solving sessions during class.

I hoped to use the Articulate Storyline to create interactive online video packages which mix short video lectures with quizzes. Articulate Storyline is able to export context in SCORM format, which is compatible with various Learning Management Systems (LMS) e.g. Blackboard, Moodle.

Following initial discussions and follow-up training sessions with Patrick Kiely and Claire Fennell of the UCC Instructional Design Team, I have set about creating interactive video lectures using Storyline. The Panopto video was first split into short clips, embedded into Storyline and then interspersed with quizzes. Each quiz relates to the preceding video, and the student must correctly answer the question in order to proceed to the next video clip. This is not only a more stimulating learning exercise for the student, but also ensures that the student engages with the video material, rather than it simply playing away in the background. I have been experimenting with a range of question types (e.g. mix and match, drag and drop). However, in the context of infrared spectra, hotspot questions are particularly effective (see below).

Importantly, once the student successfully completes the module, the SCORM package reports this information back to the LMS grade centre. This feedback loop is important for the tutor, as it makes it immediately apparent which students have not viewed their pre-classroom material. So far, I have found Storyline to be quite flexible as a package, with a significant amount of community resources online. I hope to present a more comprehensive report during the June 7th Showcase.